1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a metal gate structure, and more particularly, to a gate structure with composite film stack suited for mass production.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As deep sub-micron geometries such as line width, contact area, and junction depth of integrated circuits continue to shrink, RC delay contact and resistance become major factors that adversely affect devices performance. To cope with these problems, chipmakers have used polycide materials to replace conventional polysilicon gate and used silicide at the contact junctions to reduce contact resistance. Typically, silicide thin film is made by thermally treating a metal thin film. The metal thin film may be deposited with evaporation or sputtering. With furnace annealing or RTP annealing in high-purity nitrogen or argon environment, the metal thin film reacts with silicon surface to form silicide. Typical gate silicide materials include titanium silicide, tungsten silicide, cobalt silicide, nickel silicide, molybdenum silicide, platinum silicide, and so on.
Other approaches using non-silicide metal gate structure, for example, stack gates with tungsten metal layer or tantalum metal layer, have also been developed. The fabrication processes of the non-silicide metal gates are similar to the fabrication processes of polycide gates. After consecutively deposition of polysilicon and metals, lithography and gate etching processes are carried out. In some cases, after the definition of gate structure, selective tungsten deposition is performed to form an additional tungsten thin film on the gate and on the source/drain areas. However, it is disadvantageous that the way of forming additional tungsten film over gate/source/drain may lead to bridging between the gate and the source/drain of the transistors, thus reducing the production yield. In still some other cases, the metal gate structure may be pure metal layer without polysilicon. The advantages include very low resistance and prevention of carrier depletion. The later is especially important to deep sub-micron devices, because when carrier depletion takes places in the polysilicon layer of a gate, an equivalent depletion capacitor forms in series with the gate oxide capacitor, leading to a reduced capacitance of gate capacitor and debilitated driving ability of the transistor.
In light of the above, it has become a mainstream to use low-resistance metal gate for avoiding RC delay as the line width of devices shrinks to nano-scale. Accordingly, there is a strong need to provide a metal gate structure with composite film stack that is suited for mass production.